Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [Hardcover]

Douglas R. Hofstadter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1979

Douglas Hofstadter’s book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel Escher and Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Everything is a symbol, and symbols can combine to form patterns. Patterns are beautiful and revelatory of larger truths. These are the central ideas in the thinking of Kurt Gödel, M.C. Escher, and Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps the three greatest minds of the past quarter-millennium. In a stunning work of humanism, Hofstadter ties together the work of mathematician Gödel, graphic artist Escher, and composer Bach.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, a Pulitzer prize-winning treatise on genius, explores the workings of brilliant people's brains with the help of historical examples and brainteaser puzzles. Not for the dim or the lazy, this book shows you, more clearly than most any other, what it means to see symbols and patterns where others see only the universe. Touching on math, computers, literature, music, and artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a challenging and potentially life-changing piece of writing. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 776 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; First Edition edition (May 31, 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465026850
• ISBN-13: 978-0465026852
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #257,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mind Expanding, January 2, 2003

By 

Joe Hardy (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Paperback)

In his book Science and Sanity, in explaining his great formulations of _abstracting_ and _consciousness of abstracting_, Alfred Korzybski coined three fundamental truths about human knowledge and understanding: (1)The map is not the territory, (2) the map does not show all of the territory, and (3) the map is self-reflexive. It is this last truth, the map is self-reflexive, which interests Douglas Hofstader, and he does a wonderful job of exploring it in all its richness, using the works of Godel, Escher, and Bach as a theme or jumping-off point, on to modern mathematics and beyond. He says, "I remember at an early age, there was nothing more fascinating to me than the idea of taking three 3's: operating upon 3 with itself! I was sure that this idea was so subtle that it was inconceivable to anyone else--but I dared ask my mother one day how big it was anyway, and she answered "Nine"."

Reading and working with this book is like getting a college education on the cheap, a wonderful introduction to a variety of fascinating and enlightening subjects whose substance is only vaguely understood (if at all) by the average individual. It will clear these up for you quite nicely.

28 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GEB as scripture, January 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Paperback)

In 1979 a book appeared which expressed a religious vision using examples from mathematics, art, music, psychology, biology, physics and other fields so amazingly that I placed it with my collection of world scriptures. It remains there today.

Written by artificial intelligence researcher Douglas R Hofstadter, the book, Godel, Escher, Bach won a Pulitzer Prize. It was called the "best non-fiction book of the 20th Century." No theologian of any age -- not Aquinas, not Tillich, not Nagarjuna, not Samkara -- has written more ingeniously about God and the mystery of consciousness.

Its 800 pages are difficult but fun.

Even if you don't do math or Zen koans, you can follow the book's development because before each chapter is a story which illustrates the chapter's theme. These fictions are themselves written as pieces of contrapuntal music. "Crab Canon," for example, reads the same whether you begin at the first or the last sentence.

One theme of the book is recursion, which can be described as a procedure which contains a smaller version of itself, like a story within a story. This theme prepares the reader to see how DNA, for example, is information which copies itself through generations -- DNA as both "software" and "hardware."

In this light, the book itself becomes a recursive revelation, a self-extracting document which the universe has brought forth. This suggests that the universe, too, is recursive.

This book illustrates how can we decode its sacred meaning from every and any situation.

If there ever were a book about which it might be said, not in any simple, literal sense, but in the most profound way possible, that it was written by God (if there is a God), this may be the book. How can such a claim be justified? The book pushes Hofstadter aside (or rather, inside) and itself answers in the most natural yet amazing way.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It saved me 40+ years of armchair philosophizing, April 27, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Paperback)

It changed my life. I had majored in philosophy and psychology. It answered all the major questions I had: How can neurons just fire on/off and somehow combine to produce seeing, hearing, thinking, etc.?
Then I found DHR's G.E.B.! My favorite part is the "anthill" analogy: Ants have no brains, just a nerve center, yet these dumb ants prosper. How is that possible? Where is the intelligence? Answer: it is distributed as a system within the anthill itself! Soldier ants defend, queen ants lay eggs, workers do the leg work, etc. -- But each ant doesn't know anything, doesn't have "consciousness". The individual ant (neuron) does one thing, and one thing only, yet in a complex system, the WHOLE is greater than the sum of its PARTS.
It's all related: foreground vs. background, the medium is the message, the simulated feeling in simulated people produce simulated pleasure/pain. The confusion of form & content (like DNA sequencing, and Bach's crab canon) makes one's mind spin!
I don't pretend to understand the mathematical part, but Part Two just blew my mind. Yes, it is my favorite book of all time.